It is known that optical fibers having non-circular cross-sectional outer shapes, such as a D-shaped fiber, are used for various purposes, such as coupling light (or the evanescent field) into and/or out of the fiber and/or for mechanically determining, orienting or aligning the polarization states of a fiber. Some uses of such D-shaped fiber is discussed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,386,822; 4,054,366; 4,669,814; 4,387,954; 4,589,725; 4,054,366; 3,887,264; 3,823,997, all of which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety. However, in such cases, the fiber is either highly lossy or very difficult to manufacture and/or very difficult to use because they are very delicate and fragile. In particular, when a portion of a cladding of an optical fiber is removed to create a D-shaped fiber portion, it is very fragile due to the very small diameter of the cladding, e.g., about 125 microns.